Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of computer processors. More particularly, the invention relates to an apparatus and method for determining thread execution parallelism.
Description of the Related Art
Application software that partitions its work across multiple cores (such as Intel® Architecture (IA®) cores) and the integrated graphics (GFX) hardware expects the operating system (OS) and the GFX driver to effectively schedule the compute resources for best performance and to optimally split the power and thermal budgets between all compute engines for the best energy efficiency.
However, limitations exist with respect to the effective scheduling of compute resources, such as: (1) the OS and the GFX driver have no way to share information to enable global optimization of performance and power; and (2) in current processors the hardware may force the compute engines to a temporary idle state, transparently to system software, making it harder for the OS and the GFX driver to monitor and control the activity of the compute engines.